


The Immortals

by theladyscribe



Series: Greek Verse [2]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 09:05:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theladyscribe/pseuds/theladyscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“To younger brothers who cannot hold their drink,” Dean says, thinking of his younger brother who had one beer and turned in for the night, giving him the good fortune of being alone when this woman saw him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Immortals

_Real heroes are immortal, because in each succeeding age they are born again, in a new guise. --J Press_  

“Excuse me, I didn’t order this.” Dean holds up the bottle of Ouzo the bartender has just set in front of him.

“Girl in the corner sent it over,” the man tells him.

Dean raises his eyebrows. “I see. Well. Any chance I could order a second bottle?”

The man hands him another of the clear glass bottles, and Dean heads toward the back booth where the girl is sitting. She smiles at him as he comes to stand by the table. Dean is slightly taken aback by her. ‘Girl’ is certainly not the right word for her; she is beautiful in an almost otherworldly sense. Her hair is long and curly and jet black, her eyes silvery grey set against long, dark lashes. If she stood, she would easily be Dean’s height, and he can see that her entire body is shapely and stunning, like something out of a dream. Dean swallows thickly and finally finds words to speak.

“Ouzo?” he asks, his voice a bit more strangled than it should be.

She grins, and he thinks she is enjoying his discomfiture. “You looked like you needed something stronger than that piss you Americans call beer,” she says. Her words are accented strangely; she is obviously European, but Dean cannot say what part of the continent. “My mother was Greek,” she offers as explanation, almost as if she is reading his mind. “I spent my childhood there, though now I live with my father in his home. Father tells me that I look like her.”

“Your mother must be very beautiful then,” Dean says, and he feels like kicking himself for using such a ridiculous line. Sam would be laughing if he were here.

Surprisingly, she doesn’t laugh in his face. Instead, she says, “She was,” and looks away for a moment before turning her grey eyes back on him. “Will you stand there all night or will you have a seat?” she says after a moment.

Dean blinks and seats himself hurriedly. He scratches his head. “So…”

“Artie,” she supplies. “Artie Leto.”

“Dean Winchester,” he tells her. “Thanks for the Ouzo.” He takes a quick gulp of the drink and then struggles to hold back a cough.

Artie’s eyes glitter, and he is sure that she is secretly laughing at him now. “Have you ever drunk Ouzo before?” she asks when he has gained control of his coughing.

Dean shakes his head. “No.”

“You are supposed to mix it with water and take very small sips of it. It is sort of like absinthe, except less potent and still legal.” She demonstrates with the other bottle Dean brought over. She pours a little of the drink into a glass and then pours water from a pitcher in as well. The liquid turns milky white in front of their eyes. Artie hands the glass to Dean. “Small sips,” she tells him, pouring her own glass.

Dean holds up his glass. “A toast?”

She nods and says, “To the Cloud-gatherer and his queen.”

Dean frowns slightly at her odd toast but goes along with it anyway. “To the Cloud-gatherer,” he agrees. “And to younger brothers who cannot hold their drink,” he says, thinking of his younger brother who had one beer and turned in for the night, giving him the good fortune of being alone when this woman saw him.

Artie laughs a little, and Dean dazedly wonders what he said that was so amusing. “To younger brothers,” she repeats and takes a long sip of her drink.

“Artie? Who is this?” The voice is accented with the same European lilt in Artie’s voice, and Dean turns to see a young man with bronze skin and golden hair standing behind him. If Dean has called Artie beautiful, he must call this young man exquisite. His features are like those of a perfectly-formed statue, and the sheer physicality of the man is apparent even in his stance. His eyes are shrewd, but not suspicious, and Dean surmises that he’s not a jealous boyfriend, mostly because he has not been thrown across the barroom yet.

Artie smiles. “Paul, this is Dean Winchester. Dean, my younger brother, Paul Leto.”

“We’ve heard of you, Dean Winchester,” Paul says, coming to sit beside his sister. “Word is that you and your brother are the best hunters in the States. Maybe even the hemisphere.”

“You’re hunters, too, then?” Dean asks them.

“You could say that,” Artie allows. It makes a little more sense now, why she would call him over to sit with her – and why the two of them are so obviously in such excellent physical condition. It also makes more sense why Artie toasted old gods rather than the Christian god; he has met many hunters who find it more prudent to follow the old traditions rather than the new when it comes to their own spirituality, even if they use the Latin exorcisms.

Paul nods at his sister. “She is the hunter; I somehow get saddled with most of the research.”

“It is because I am the elder, brother-mine,” Artie says, smiling sweetly.

“By one day!” Paul protests, and Dean can tell that this is an age-old argument that is more teasing than arguing.

Artie grins at the confusion on Dean’s face. “I was born just before midnight,” she tells him, and he nods in understanding. “But yes,” she says, returning to their earlier subject, “we are hunters.”

“Specialty?” he asks.

“Archery,” Artie says.

“The hunting bow,” Paul says, giving his sister a look. “We mostly hunt forest-dwellers – wendigos, werewolves, chimeras.”

“Chimeras? I thought those were just myths.”

“They are not so mythical in Europe,” Artie tells him with a grim smile.

Dean raises his eyebrows. “You guys hunt in Europe?” They nod in unison, and Dean shakes his head. “I guess it makes sense; America can’t have a monopoly on the monsters.”

“Luckily, there are not many creatures left in Europe, and there is no way they could ever cross the Ocean.”

Dean laughs a little. “I imagine there are a lot of things that would not make it through airport security. And more than a few weapons that could not get through Customs.”

“We do not fly. We – ” Artie is cut off by an elbow to the ribs, and she glares at her brother.

“We sail,” Paul interrupts, “if we have to cross the Ocean at all.”

“I don’t fly either,” Dean says. “I hate planes.”

They fall into easy conversation, trying to outdo each other with their tales of hunts and creatures of the night. Dean tells them about his first encounter with a werewolf, and Artie returns with a tale about a creature that was half-man, half-lion that they dealt with in Thebes. “It was a vicious thing,” she says. “And annoying. It only spoke in riddles, and its breath was so foul that it made one ill just to be near it. Paul finally discovered that in order to defeat it, we had to answer its riddles correctly. The monster was so enraged that it killed itself.”

“So if you guys hunt in Greece,” Dean says suddenly, “what are you doing on this side of the Pond?”

Artie winces slightly, but at what, Dean doesn’t know. “We have not been hunting for long – ” Paul chokes on his drink and Artie shoots him a glare before continuing, “ – and we were told that the best hunters today are here in the States. Your father, for one, is something of a legend in Greece. We were dismayed to learn of his passing when we arrived here.”

Dean’s jaw tightens, and he mutters, “Yeah, me too,” before taking a long drink of Ouzo.

They fall into an awkward silence for a few moments, and then Paul speaks up. “How do you do it, Dean?”

“Do what?” Dean asks, confused.

“How do you keep it from consuming you completely? I have heard that there are hunters who let their work consume them so fully that they almost become what they hunt. How do you avoid it?” The man’s eyes are earnest, and Dean is suddenly reminded of the look Sam gets when he’s questioning someone involved in a hunt.

He shrugs a little. “I dunno. I guess – I’ve been doing this so long that I don’t really know any other way to live,” he says. “But from the first day my dad took me on a hunt, he impressed on me the importance of the job. It wasn’t about killing for the sake of killing. It was about defeating monsters, defeating evil, so that other people could have what my family doesn’t – won’t – have: a normal life, lived without the knowledge of what is hiding under the bed or around the corner or behind the trees.”

Artie and Paul share a secretive smile, and then Artie says, “A noble endeavor, Dean Winchester.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he answers, quiet. And then, “It also – I guess it helps that I’ve got Sam, my brother, with me.” He scratches his head a little sheepishly. “He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but if it weren’t for him, man, I’d be dead sixty times over.”

Paul grins and elbows Artie in the ribs. “See, Artie? It is a good thing that you have kept me around all these years,” he tells his sister, and the somber mood is lifted from the trio.

Artie rolls her eyes and returns, “But if it were not for you, we would not have nearly so many problems on our hunts, Paul.”

Again, they slip into easy conversation about hunts and some of the difficulties of not always having a clear idea of what they were dealing with. “One time,” Dean says, “we were working on a case about a haunted mountain. People swore they could hear something singing on the mountain at night. It turned out there was some hermit living in a cave who’d sleep during the day and get drunk and sing Gregorian chants at night.”

The night continues on like this until Dean realizes they are among the last patrons in the bar. He bids the pair a good night, saying he needs to get back to the hotel and sleep. “We’re following a lead on a possible haunting down around Nashville,” he says as he stands, “and we’re leaving in the morning, so I’d better go get some sleep.”

“We will not be here tomorrow, either,” Artie says. “There is business elsewhere we must attend. What lucky chance it is that we met you tonight.” She grasps his hand and her hold is firm, her palm surprisingly soft for a woman who has been hunting for any length of time. “Good luck in your journey, Dean Winchester. May the gods favor you.” The woman’s eyes glow with a strange light, and Dean is suddenly reminded of a seer he and Sam met once in North Carolina whose eyes were far older than the rest of her.

*

After Dean leaves, the twins order another round of Ouzo. They drink it straight from the bottle, and it has little effect on them. “Paul and Artie?” the brother asks, laughing.

“I could not give him our real names – he would have laughed us off as drunkards.”

“Yes, but ‘Artie’? You could at least have chosen something a little more… pretty.”

His sister sets her jaw. “I happen to like the name ‘Artie,’ thank you. I thought it suited both our surroundings and our guest.”

He sighs. “I suppose you are right. And I also suppose that I should thank you for giving me a simple name. ‘Paul’ is so much easier to stomach than anything you could have come up with had you used ‘Phoebus’.”

“I did not want him thinking you a lover of men,” she answers with a smirk.

He rolls his eyes. “Thank you.”

“He is a good choice, yes?” She changes the subject quickly, but he does not miss a beat.

“Aye, a very good choice. They always are, dear sister-mine.”

“I know,” she says, “but I wanted your approval before I declared him my champion.” She sighs a little and looks suddenly older than her twenty-five years. “He will have a hard road ahead of him.”

“Yes, but they always do.”


End file.
